overauthor

English

Etymology

over- +‎ author

Verb

overauthor (third-person singular simple present overauthors, present participle overauthoring, simple past and past participle overauthored)

1. To add too many names to the list of authors on a work produced by a team.
   • 1982, Miscellaneous Publication - Issues 18-19, page 47:

     In most cases, it is better to "overauthor" in team publications than to "underauthor", to include an individual if there is...

   • 1986 October, SP Lock, “For wrapping the fish and chips”, in Archives of disease in childhood, volume 61, number 10:

     Articles were not then overauthored or overreferenced: the mean number of authors per original article was 1-5 (range 1-4) in 1926, compared with 3-3 (range 1-12) in 1985;

   • 2008, RL Ballard, An ethnographic and philosophical investigation into patrol officers: Communication ethics as critical work:

     Overauthoring and Failure to Acknowledge

2. To continue revising a work past the point where the revisions improve the work.
   • 1994, Jack Stillinger, Coleridge and Textual Instability, →ISBN:

     In 1817, which marks the first appearance of The Ancient Mariner as a work by Coleridge, the poem is, by contrast, almost overauthored.

   • 2010 Fall, Sheila Liming, “Of Anarchy and Amateurism: Zine Publication and Print Dissent”, in The Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association, volume 43, number 2, page 137:

     The problem that Benjamin identifies with this impulse, however, is the opportunity to overauthor the world; in the same essay Benjamin castigates the practice of photography as artistic production, stating that this art form merely 'succeed[s] in transforming even abject poverty—by apprehending it in a fashionably perfected manner—into an object of enjoyment.'

   • 2013, Jonathan Hughes, Simon Sadler, Non-Plan, →ISBN, page 137:

     Caught between the plan and the non-plan the city-as-text vacillates between being overauthored and unauthored.

   • 2010, Ann-Marie Bathmaker, Penelope Harnett, Exploring Learning, Identity and Power through Life History and Narrative Research, →ISBN:

     Whilst there are many aspects of both the interview data and their analysis that I could choose to focus on here, it may lead to a thin, possibly falsely chronological and over-simplistic/over-authored narrative.